This WordPress.com site is about our life and experiences after retiring in San Clemente Ecuador

Peanuts in Ecuador

Even though Mary and I have both grown gardens in several northern states in the United States, neither of us have had much experience growing tropical or warm weather crops. And neither of us had ever tried to raise peanuts before. Mary did her homework/research on google and I went to scores of stores and mercados to try to find maní en crudos (raw peanuts) to plant in four or five containers in our yard.

Not surprisingly, the plants grew quickly.

But a couple of weeks ago we started wondering if the plants were producing actual peanuts. I carefully dug around one of the plants and came up with this.

The plants looked a bit immature still, so we waited until today to try again. This time we dug up all of the plants from one of the containers.

Shook off the dirt and came up with this!

A closer look shows quite a few good-sized peanuts clinging to the roots of these four plants.

Mary learned that we were supposed to hang the peanut plants (with the peanuts on top) somewhere for the plants to dry. So we used what we had handy and the peanuts (plants and all) are drying under our patio umbrella.

When the plants are dry, Mary will decide if these little beauties get roasted, salted, seasoned, or just eaten raw!

We continue to learn better ways to use the bounteous earth that surrounds us here in San Clemente where…

Fantastic! Peanuts! We grew them in our garden, but the dang rats ate almost all of them. We got one bunch of untouched peanuts. So, we got 3 rescue cats to eat the rats in the garden. But, our cats are spoiled and they only play with the rats that enter our house. Next time, we’re growing them in pots, like you did. There is always a learning curve in planting a tropical garden.

I know that we have some rodents around here, but the owls, hawks, and snakes seem to keep them at bay and growing the peanuts in containers probably did help keep them safe too. Over all we were pleased with this first effort. Yes, there is a learning curve to growing things here, but it is fun.

isn’t it fun when those little treasures reveal themselves? like potatoes, peanuts benefit from ‘piling the soil’ little by little on the crown, so they keep growing higher and higher while making more ‘crop’ below ground… an old timer in mississippi shared that with me a long long time ago…

I had neighbors in Utah that planted potatoes in old tires and as the plant grew taller than the tire, they would pile another tire on top of the first and fill that tire with soil. They would do that four or five times in the summer and then after the first frost would harvest their potatoes by simply removing the tires. Seemed to work well in a small area to produce a lot of potatoes.

Do you think we harvested these a bit early? We will try another container full in a week or two and see if more peanuts are on those plants. Either way, we were pretty happy with the bunch we got on out first effort.